The PPAM Index #1 - Tim Burton

Last updated 13:06 26/10/2012

I went to see Tim Burton's latest film, Frankenweenie, the other day.

It's great. His best film for a very long time. In fact, I would say it is his best film since Mars Attacks! in 1996. It feels like a perfect, if slighter, companion piece to Burton's masterpiece - Ed Wood.

As a rule of thumb, if a project is deeply personal to Burton the film is great, but if it is just an exercise in style for a big studio, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Alice in Wonderland, the results are not so great.

This got me thinking about the careers of various film-makers. I started to wonder if there was a way I could reduce the careers of great directors to a single number that captured their critical standing, commercial success, productivity and longevity.

I could then catalogue all these numbers in a little league table and finally work out, once and for all, who is the best.

A bit like pinning butterflies to pieces of card and then keeping them all in a glass case. Fine if you stick with butterflies, but move on to neighbourhood cats and everyone gets all cross.

Anyway, if only there were some way to reduce art to a single number using utterly arbitrary and slightly haphazard means.

Well, turns out there is. Ladies and gentleman, I am here today to unveil for your delight - The Picture Palace Auteur Meter, or PPAM for short.

So, how does my machine work? Well, it's steam powered obviously, but aside from that it basically adds up a director's average box office takings, the average critical reception of their films, my opinion of them (natch), the length of their career and how often they make movies.

There are a couple of rules. You have to be alive and still making movies and you will only be issued a PPAM rating if you have a film out that month.

I wondered whether to include box office figures in my calculations, but eventually decided that the number of tickets sold is an interesting indicator of how closely a director is tapping the zeitgeist.

But I've watered down the influence of box office in the final figure because films that make lots of money are not necessarily great quality. (Remember, this is utterly arbitrary.)

I tinkered with the mechanics of my devilish formula by comparing David Fincher, Steven Spielberg, Edgar Wright and Michael Bay. I didn't want Michael Bay's crazy box office average to swamp out his appalling critical record, or vice versa with someone like Edgar Wright.